Top Ten Herbs For Teas

Last week saw UK publication of my first book, Infuse: Herbal Teas to Cleanse, Nourish and Heal, co-written with Karen Sullivan, which will come out here in the US on May 3rd. Compiling the more than seventy recipes was a delightful way to spend several weeks last summer. I wanted the teas to taste delicious and bring all kinds of herbal benefits: from relaxing bedtime brews to teas to treat allergies, relieve aching muscles, balance blood sugar and even improve memory.

Taking a few minutes each day to make and enjoy a delicious cup of herb tea is a lovely way to care for yourself, mentally and physically. They’re easy to make, cost very little and you can enjoy many different health benefits with even a small selection of dried herbs.

You may have a selection of herbal teabags in a cupboard, but consider blending your own from dried herbs. Most commercial manufacturers break the herbs down to almost a powder to get them into the tea bag — this causes the herbs to oxidize, impairing their flavor and medicinal benefits. If you’d like to experiment with making herbal tea blends at home, here are my top five dried herbs to create a basic tea apothecary, and a few tips to get the best results.

Chamomile – everyone knows that chamomile relaxes and helps with sleep, but did you know that a strong brew (1 tablesoon dried chamomile flowers to a mug of boiling water) works brilliantly to relieve tension headaches? It also has benefits for digestion and reduces bloating and discomfort after eating, making this a perfect herb to include in a caffeine-free evening tea.

Damiana – I’m always surprised that this Mexican herb is not better known. With a strong, distinctive taste and a gently stimulant action for mind and body, it makes a terrific caffeine-free replacement for coffee in the morning. It also has something of a reputation as an aphrodisiac, so may add a little oomph at bedtime too.

Elderflower – visit parks and wildplaces to harvest your own elderflowers in springtime, and hang smallish bunches enclosed in a loose paper bag upside down in a cool dark place to dry. The tea can be drunk hot or cold to reduce fever and alleviate hayfever symptoms. Or prepare a delicious elderflower cordial by making 250ml of sugar syrup, removing it from the heat and immediately adding a handful of fresh elderflowers. Allow to cool, strain, bottle and store in the fridge for up to a month. Dilute with still or sparkling water, or add a dash to cocktails.

Lemon Balm – easy to grow for fresh herb teas, and easily dried to ensure a year round taste of summer, lemon balm has a fresh lemony taste and makes a delightful tea herb. It has a unique ‘cheering up’ quality to lift your spirits, is calming and soothing for digestion, and has a useful anti-viral action to prevent and treat colds, flu and coldsores.

Liquorice  – you either love the taste or can’t stand it. If like me you adore the aniseedy flavour, a little dried liquorice root (and you don’t need much) is a great addition to herb tea recipes for coughs, viruses, digestive discomfort and all kinds of inflammatory conditions. Its sweetness masks more bitter herbs, making it a great addition to children’s teas. My son adores making liquorice and peppermint which has a yummy, sweet flavor his friends love. Avoid this herb if you have high blood pressure, as it may exacerbate it.

Linden flower – also known as lime flower (and in France, where it’s hugely popular as a tisane, as tilleuil), the trees bearing these curious looking blossoms grow widely in the UK and Europe, where its gorgeous scent sweetens midsummer city streets. Harvest and dry your own for a blast of summer sunshine all year round or buy it ready dried. I don’t need a medical excuse to enjoy this lovely tea, but I particularly reach for it when I want to feel relaxed and calm and when my child has a fever. It has a reputation for lowering cholesterol and maintaining good arterial health.

Meadowsweet – I adore the aroma and taste of this herb, it really does smell like a sweet summer meadow. The leaves contain salicylates, the chemical which gives aspirin its anti-inflammatory action making it a terrific choice of you have arthritis or other inflammatory conditions. It also relieves indigestion making it a perfect after-dinner tea. Believing that most illnesses have inflammation at their base, I drink a tea with meadowsweet most days.

Peppermint – if you have it, fresh mint is easy to grow and makes a delightful tea, but dried is good too. Drink it on its own to relieve indigestion and help reduce a fever or combine it with other herbs to add a minty freshness to your brews.

Sage – another herb which can be plucked fresh from the garden or dried for convenience. Truthfully, sage really doesn’t taste as good the other herbs listed here. But it’s SO useful. On its own or with other herbs and a good spoonful of honey, it works a treat on sore throats. And if you allow it to cool before drinking, it’s the best remedy I know to reduce menopausal hot sweats.

Skullcap – my go-to remedy for stress and anxiety. I love the way skullcap calms the nerves without being sedative, making it perfect for stressful situations such as exams and presentations. It also helps reduce circular thinking, so I often add it to sleep teas when the problem is waking in the night with an overactive mind.

Tea Tips

• Always use fresh, preferably filtered water and bring it just to the boil and allow it to cool for a minute or two before pouring to avoid scalding the herbs.
• Choose organic or wilcrafted herbs if you can. If you have a garden or even a sunny windowsill, consider growing a few herbs for a supply of fragrant fresh leaves.
• Sniff herbs when you are buying avoiding any which smell ‘off’. Look for herbs which are recognizably leaves/flowers or whatever and a good colour. For example, chamomile should have lots of yellow flower centres and tiny white petals.
• Store dried herbs in airtight containers. Coloured or opaque jars or tins can be kept on a cool shelf, but if you’re using clear glass, keep them in a drawer or cupboard as light damages dried herbs.
• See here for a list of resources where you can buy good quality dried herbs. It’s also worth asking at your local herb or health food store.

If you’re feeling inspired to take your herbal tea making to the next level, you can order Infuse: Herbal Teas to Cleanse, Nourish and Heal here (UK) and pre-order here (US)...

Because I’m Hoppy

Apologies to Pharrell and all who cringe at puns. But I am feeling both happy and hoppy today! It was my son’s first day back at school and the hops which entwine their way through the Life Lab fence were ripe for harvesting. Since Caprice, the lovely Life Lab doyenne allows me to pick from the garden, I paused on my way out with my scissors and quickly had a bag filled with fragrant strobiles, as their strange papery female blossoms are correctly known.

Most people could tell you that hops are what give beer its distinctive bitter taste, but it’s less commonly known that they are a useful and effective herbal remedy. One of the earliest known records of Humulus lupus being used in beer dates from the 11th Century when Abbess, herbalist, composer and all-round wonder woman, Hidegaard von Bingen wrote about their use. Previously a variety of different bitter herbs had been used to balance the sweetness of malt (not least Mugwort which gets its name from this practice: mug-wort = mug plant). Hops were found to be far more effective at preserving beer, due to their highly anti-microbial action. But we can be pretty sure that before anyone thought of adding hops to beer, the herb was already being used medicinally.

Modern day herbalists like myself principally use hops as a tea or tincture in sleep remedies. The strobiles are cooling and have excellent sedative properties. I tend to use a fairly small proportion in a sleep mix, usually about 10-20%, as they blend well with other herbs which relax the mind and body. The cooling nature of hops, together with their oestrogenic (estrogenic if you’re in the US) property makes hops a great choice in peri-menopause when hot flushes (or flashes) can lead to soaked sheets and disturbed sleep. It’s also traditional to include dried hops with other herbs such as lavender in a sleep pillow, which can be slipped inside a pillow-case to aid deep and restful sleep.

I also use hops from time to time for unexplained lower abdominal pain in women. It’s important to get any pain like this checked out by a doctor, but if, as sometimes happens, all the tests and scans come back clear and the pain persists, it can be helpful.

There are a couple of things to know before you take hops. Firstly, the condition charmingly known as ‘brewer’s droop’ is not just down to the alcohol in beer — just as hops are oestrogenic (and, indeed, there are saucy tales of hops’ aphrodisiac properties in female hop pickers of the 19th and early 20th century in Kent, England – ask me sometime and I’ll tell you…), for men, the plant can be a powerful AN-aphrodisiac, suppressing both desire and ability. 

Something else I bear in mind before giving someone hops is that, in common with all UK-trained herbalists, I was taught never to give them in depression, which they have a reputation for exacerbating. I’ve had many conversations with colleagues over the years about where this came from, and there are some who disagree with this proscription. For myself, I suspect that the cooling, suppressing nature of hops makes them profoundly unsuitable in deep, dark, hopeless depression, but that they may actually be quite useful for the ‘hotter’ more anxiety-led kind. Depression is such a blanket term for a range of different symptoms. But there are lots of very effective sedative and relaxing herbs, so I generally steer towards avoiding their use in anyone who is depressed, and I’d strongly recommend similar caution if you are self-medicating with herbs.

If you’d like to see whether hops might help you have a better night, here is a recipe for a nighttime tea, to help soothe you to sleep. As ever, if you are on medication, have a serious illness or are pregnant or breastfeeding, talk to your doctor or a qualified herbalist before using herbs.

SWEET SLEEP TEA

½ tsp tsp Hops

1 tsp Passionflower

1 tsp Chamomile

½ tsp Lemon Balm

½ tsp Linden flower

A little honey to sweeten if liked

Place all the herbs in large warmed teapot. Pour over nearly-boiling water and cover with the lid. Steep for 5-10 minutes then strain and pour into a mug. Drink a cup an hour or so before bed then pour another cup to take to bed, you can drink a little and then have some beside the bed to drink if you wake in the night.

BEAUTIFUL ALBIZZIA

When I lived and practiced in London, one of my favourite summer traditions was picking Linden Flowers. Around midsummer, I would find myself standing beneath arching boughs collecting the sweet-smelling blossoms between the tree's heart-shaped bright green leaves. Running a busy practice in a big city, afforded few opportunities for home medicine making, so I savoured this tradition, looking forward to it from the moment the trees started to bud in early spring.

Here in California, I love how I can I can grow, gather and make much of my medicine. It's helped me form a closer relationship with many of my favourite herbs and nothing beats the vitality of a tincture whose contents travel from plant to jar in just a few minutes. But I do miss picking Linden, which won’t grow in this harsh dry climate. A few weeks ago I was back in England with my family. It was around midsummer and the strange flowers dangled from numerous Linden trees. When I spotted one, I took to lying underneath to drink in that sweet, musky scent which instantly transported me to summers past. I didn’t have time to pick and tincture, and even if I had and there had been room in our bags, US customs take a dim view of importing anything herbal without a licence.

On our return to Santa Cruz I started noticing how many Albizzia trees there are in our neighbourhood. And that they were in flower. I started using Albizzia a little before I left London, but have become closer to it here thanks to my friend and colleague Darren Huckle who practices Chinese as well as Western Herbal medicine. Commercially, it’s usually the bark which is on offer - probably because the incredibly beautiful and delicate fluffy blossoms are time consuming to harvest. The bark is great, but the flowers from what is known as ‘Happiness Tree’ in China are something special - wonderfully uplifting: improving mood and providing support during times of  mental and emotional darkness. 

Driving around town, all the trees I could see were on private property. What to do? After about the fifth occasion when I screeched the car to a halt and stared longingly out of the window, mentally calculating which branches I could reach, my son suggested that I just knock on a door and ask. Now, I’m English, and we don’t really do that kind of thing. But... a few days later, when I could see that the flowers were starting to fade, I realized that it was now or never (or at least not until next year). So, tentatively, I stepped up to the front door of a house with a particularly tempting low growing Albizzia in its front yard and rang the bell. The semi-naked gentleman who answered it looked surprised, but after I had gabbled my explanation and apologies, he seemed to decide I was a fairly unthreatening lunatic and invited me to take my pick. I came home with a bulging paper bag and a very happy smile. Emboldened, I decided to make use of our excellent neighbourhood email group and see who else could help. Two lovely and generous people came right back, and one even had her young daughters scampering up the tree and cascading me with blossoms. 

Seeing the flowers up close I have been stunned by their beauty and perfection, and delighted by their delicate, sweet, slightly musky fragrance which, amazingly, is reminiscent of Linden flowers. Just a few days later, I can see that the flowers are coming to an end, the once bright pink and green feathers are brown dust on the ground. Mine, meanwhile, are nestled into a jar of vodka which has turned light pink as they have faded to white. I’m so glad I plucked up my courage and, most of all, happy that I now have a California version of my much-cherished London tradition.

Wheezy the Chicken

This picture contains my greatest passion and my latest passion. Before I start, I should say that it's illegal, both here in the US and in the UK for herbalists to treat animals. However when the animals are yours, one of them is sick and you're concerned for the wellbeing of the others, any herbalist is going to do what they can.

The chickens came to live with us about 6 weeks ago, and soon after, one of them started coughing, sneezing and wheezing. I consulted Doctor Google and discovered the alarming range of diseases that chickens get. I pestered everyone I know who has chickens for more info, I asked at the feed store and I even called out the vet at a cost equivalent to approximately 120 eggs! I didn't want to give the girls antibiotics, partly because I want to eat their eggs, but also because nothing pointed to it being a bacterial infection and I care deeply about overuse of antibiotics. Everything suggested that poor Wheezy (as we rather cruelly named her, my son insisted we change it to Rosie, but it has kind of stuck), had a cold. A pretty standard viral infection.

I give elderberry (amongst other things) to people with viruses, so why not try the same with the chickens? Animals can react differently to plants than humans - for example avocado is poisonous to chickens - so I checked every source I could to make sure they'd be safe and started cautiously. I started giving them a handful of dried berries, soaked overnight in a little water and mixed with handful of scratch most days. It was interesting to notice how  the sick chicken seemed particularly keen on them. And this week? Well, I hope I'm not speaking too soon, but Wheezy/Rosie laid an egg this week (and I think may have gifted us with another today), her comb has returned to a nice bright red (from the pale blotchy thing it was a week or two ago) and she's definitely coughing and sneezing less...

Bodies are amazing things, and it's possible she would have simply got better on her own, but I'm keeping on with the elderberries - lots of new evidence backs up their efficacy for viral infections and, apart from anything else they're a good source of Vitamin C. And, as you can see from my picture, my rather picky chicks absolutely love them!

HERBAL SKINCARE CLASS

 

I’m excited to share that my HERBAL SKINCARE CLASS will be on Saturday March 21st here on Spring Street from 10:30-2:30. Learn how to make your own gorgeous Organic and Natural Skincare, customized for your skin and as great gifts for family and friends.

The skin is an organ and what you put on it is absorbed into the body. This is why I am passionate that skincare should not only be effective, but so pure you could eat it! The class will be an opportunity to explore how herbs can work on the inside and the outside for your best possible skin. Our day will include:

An introduction to the best herbs to take internally for skin, how to take them and which herbs target specific skin challenges. Learn all about herbs for external use including oils, butters, waxes, aromatic waters and much more.

We'll make:

•  Unique HERBAL SKIN TEA BLEND. •   A beautifully rich LIP BALM with emollient oils, cocoa butter, shea butter, coconut oil, beeswax and essential oils. • Fabulous HAND & BODY LOTION which smells as good as it feels and brings together the smoothing and softening properties of Aloe Vera, Rosewater, Beeswax, Jojoba Oil, Rosehip Oil and Infused Oils and Essential Oils. • Your very own, custom-blended FACE OIL. High end mainstream cosmetics manufacturers recognize the incredible skin benefits of pure and rare oils. With their products costing as much as $90 for a 1oz bottle, learning to  make your own not only saves you a lot of money but, crucially, means you can experiment with different blends to get the one that’s just right for your skin. I’ll introduce you to the oils and help you blend a 1oz bottle to take  home with you on the day.

The class will be kept small and everyone will go home with a pack of Skin Tea, a lip balm, a bottle of Hand & Body Lotion and their own custom-blended skin oil.

Class fee is $90 per person. Contact me at paula@paulagrainger.com for more information or to reserve your place.

Holiday Gift Making Class

Join English Herbalist Paula Grainger for a fun & festive morninglearning how to make your own Beautiful and Natural Holiday Gifts.

Using the finest all-natural ingredients you’ll learn how to create your own handmade cosmetics as gifts and for your own use for years to come.

You’ll take home all the recipes plus a selection of gifts for this Holiday Season including:

4 x Chocolate Peppermint Lip Balm with cocoa butter

3 x Gardener’s Hand Salve with Rosemary & Thyme

2 x Orange Cinnamon Body Lotion with Jojoba oil and Orange Flower Water

SUNDAY NOV. 23RD 10-12.30 Numbers are very limited so email paula@paulagrainger.com to secure your place. $75 per person. Cash or checks payable to Paula Grainger www..paulagrainger.com

Year long Garden Herbalism Course starts October 2014

I'll be back in class with Darren Huckle Lac from October teaching our Garden Herbalism course. If you're in the Santa Cruz area, please do join us - all the details are below or contact me or Darren for further details.

Two Tuesdays/month: 5:15pm - 7:15pm Oct. 14, 2014 - June 9th, 2015 *see actual dates below*

For thousands of years, people have been harvesting medicines from their home gardens for basic family needs. This is a dynamic and hands-on introduction to the art and practical application of garden herbalism. We will spend over half our time outdoors in an herbal garden where we will harvest common herbs and discuss their uses and cultivation. We will then bring them into the herbal pharmacy classroom and learn how to make effective teas, oils and remedies for commonly encountered health challenges including but not limited to stress, sleeplessness, indigestion, and minor wounds.

By effectively preparing and using herbs, we inspire and empower the healer within. This work rejuvenates the senses and steeps us in the wonder of nature's healing powers. Participants will be exposed to an abundance of practical and easily implemented information, and will get the opportunity to bring a sampling of plants into their own home gardens.

Darren Huckle, Lac, DAOM is an instructor and practitioner in Western and Chinese Herbal Medicine with 15 years of intensive study in the use of Western Herbs. Paula Grainger BSc, MNIMH is an English Medical Herbalist who has brought her training and knowledge of traditional and modern European Herbal Medicine with her from London to Santa Cruz. Together they have decades of experience and passion in treating patients and teaching the public about natural medicine.

Class Location: Seabright Class Dates (all classes held 5:15pm - 7:15pm): Oct. 14 & 28 Nov. 11 & 25 Dec. 9 Jan. 12 & 26 Feb. 10 & 24 Mar. 10 & 24 Apr. 14 & 28 May 12 & 26 June 9

Small Class size! Space is limited Registration due September 30th Cost: $400 Pay by cash or check only. Make check out to Darren Huckle and mail to 343 Frederick St., Santa Cruz 95062

Magical Midsummer St Johns Wort

One of the nicest things about making my own herbal preparations is the way it connects me to the seasons. When I was a herbalist in London almost all my tinctures came in brown bottles packed in cardboard crates. Apart from Lemon Balm and Lime flower I just didn’t have access to enough fresh plant material, and even if I had, there was little time while I was running a business and practicing full time, to produce anywhere near enough to stock my apothecary.

Now I’m in Santa Cruz, where the way of life is slower and the plants way more abundant, so there’s been every reason to get into some tincture making. With a little wild crafting, my ever-increasing herb garden and the kindness of good people letting me forage in their gardens, I’ve been tincturing up a storm these last few weeks. Whenever possible I much prefer fresh plant tinctures, or specifics, as they are sometimes known. And that means making sure I’m ready with my snippers just as each plant comes available. Leave it a week or two too long and, for many plants, the moment has passed for a whole year. It makes me hyper-aware of what's growing around me and is giving me a much deeper understanding about my chosen home and the flora which inhabit it.

The fleeting opportunities for laying my hands on fresh herbs means I need to be prepared with plenty of supplies. Tincture means alcohol, and since I don’t like the idea of storing large quantities of the 90 percent stuff, I rely on vodka. I’m currently buying it from our local liquor store, as they have a great deal on huge 1.75l bottles of Skyy. When I went in today and purchased my third bottle in a week, it was hard not to have a flicker of embarrassment, as the imperturbable dude behind the counter ever-so-slightly raised an eyebrow.

My herb cupboards are overflowing, so the counter in our utility room is now neatly lined with mason jars as the herbs gently infuse into their vodka. The low sunny wall behind the lawn is similarly adorned with Melissa and Chamomile sun tinctures and a huge jar of St John’s Wort oil, alchemically changing from yellow to deep ruby red.

St Johns Wort (Hypericum perforatum) is a good example of a here today, gone tomorrow herb. Named for St John, it blooms on his Saints day, 24th June in England and maybe just a week or two earlier here. The deep yellow flowers with their sun-ray stamens are around for a few weeks and then they fade and the season is over until next summer. I know it’s plentiful in the Sierras and other parts of California - so plentiful in fact that it’s considered a non-native invasive and plant sales are banned - but round these parts you don’t really see it. Earlier in the year I spotted some plants on a friend’s land and asked whether I could harvest, but when I rocked up a week or two ago, snippers in hand only one plant was in flower - not enough for a tea, let alone a quantity of tincture. Luckily a new herbal friend recently told me about The Sonoma County Herb Exchange http://www.sonomaherbs.org/herbalexchange.html.  A fantastic clearing house which connects herb growers with medicine makers. Knowing time is short, I immediately ordered a pound of fresh St Johns Wort tops, (along with a pound of Wood Betony which I’ll write about another time). They arrived by courier two days later, as fresh as daisies and seriously bountiful - a pound of flowering tops is voluminous!

Within an hour of taking delivery, two thirds had been whizzed with vodka in the Vitamix, topped off and added to my stash on the counter and the rest was well covered with almond oil and ready to bask in the sun on the wall. When I say that making St John’s Wort oil is alchemy, it really does feel like that. Over the last few days I have watched the jar of golden flowers suspended in pale yellow oil, turn a deeper and deeper red as the ruby coloured hypericin in the herb is released and infuses into the oil. Once strained and poured into dark amber bottles, the oil will make a delightful and useful addition to my dispensary.

I’ll use my lovely St John’s Wort oil topically. It has an affinity with the nerves, so I’ll add it to  balms, salves and oils to rub into musculo-skeletal injuries ands aches and pains which have a nerve pain dimension, like sciatica. As an anti-viral I’ll use it alone or in combination with other oils on chickenpox, shingles and herpes lesions, where it helps reduce pain, itching and tingling too.  Another great use is to swoosh the oil around the site of toothache and after dental surgery, where it will help heal and reduce pain and infection.

And the tincture? Well, St John’s Wort is well known for being a go-to to lift the mood. There has been a fair bit of research on it, which has proven its efficacy but given it a reputation as a herb with a lot of interactions with prescription medication. The truth is that it has an effect on the liver which can speed the body’s metabolism of drugs: obviously not a good thing if the drug in question needs to release in the body over time. This can be a particular problem with  antidepressants, the contraceptive pill and blood-thinning drugs like Warfarin. Anyone on medication should, in my view, check with a herbalist or their medical practitioner before self-medicating internally with herbs and this is one where I’d recommend that more than ever.

That said, I’ve given this herb to many, many people and been delighted time and again to see how profound and enormously helpful it can be, particularly when combined with other herbs to support and lift the spirits. As its sun-ray flowers light up the meadows at midsummer, so it can shine a little light into a life when darkness threatens.

Chamazulene alchemy

I just wanted to share this little bit of alchemy. A mom at the school where we do a middle school Herbal Potions elective recently bought the equipment for distilling essential oils. She brought it in for us to experiment with and we did a huge batch of German Chamomile (Chamomilla recutita).

I love showing kids the 'hidden colors' in plants and this is such a great example. The daisy-like white and yellow chamomile flowers conceal minute quantities of lapis lazuli blue chamazulene - a constituent in the essential oil which has wonderful anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial properties.  The amounts are absolutely tiny and I think it fired the kids' imaginations to realize how  a plant which grows all around can contain something so special and rare.

WILD OATS

 

It’s a sunny and breezy afternoon here in Santa Cruz, perfect for a little stroll and a touch of wildcrafting. If you haven’t heard that term before, it’s what we call picking herbs growing the wild. Like most herbalists, I’m pretty cautious when it comes to collecting plants I’m going to use for medicine. I need to be certain that no one is spraying the area (or nearby) with pesticides or herbicides, I need to find a spot which isn’t likely to have been sprayed by passing dogs. I don’t want to pick close to a road and I’m ALWAYS mindful of the plants welfare - never taking more than a tiny percentage of what’s there. There are legal considerations too - if it’s private land, I’ll always ask first and on public property such as parks there are often rules against taking plants.

In an ideal world, I’d grow all my herbs. But today I wanted to collect some Wild Oats and since I’m not in possession of a sunny meadow to grow my own, the only way to collect them was, well, wild. There just happens to be a lovely open space with many meadows just near my house and at this time of year those meadows ripple in the breeze with the elegant chest-high stems of oats. So, what would you do?

Herbalists tend to get a little exercised about the best oat preparation. It’s widely agreed that the best is from the green, unripe seeds and some people like the green straw too. We mostly agree that the final tincture should be milky, and that means harvesting earlier in the season. As you can see from the picture, most were pretty fully ripe and I discovered that all the golden stems had shed their seeds to ensure a repeat performance next year. But in amongst the gold I spotted the almost invisibly fine green stems hanging heavy with their hairy seeds.

After a few minutes my brown paper bag was half full with seeds which I gently stripped from the wiry stems. Once home I popped them in the Vitamix (which is pricey, but a seriously useful piece of kit) with a decent amount of vodka, whizzed them up and poured the green, milky results into a mason jar. I topped it off with enough vodka to fully cover the green stuff and there it is in the cupboard. In two weeks time I’ll have a great Avena sativa tincture to dispense and enjoy.

And how will I use it? Well, Wild Oats is one of those herbs which no one shouts much about, but which is indispensable as part of a calming, nerve-restoring mix. Oats have the reputation of being a nervous system tonic, helping calm frazzled nerves during times of stress and anxiety. There’s a classic combination which teams it with Skullcap and Passionflower, which was so popular with the herbalists I used to work with at Napiers that we had it as a ready made blend - probably the only one we had in the dispensary. The combination is both powerful and gentle. Oats strengthen and restore the nervous system, Skullcap is the best anxiolytic, or anxiety calming, herb I know and Passionflower is a mild and gentle sedative. All three together will help a jumpy, tense and anxious individual find their way back to a state of calm and ease.

So, if there's a meadow near you, why not take a stroll and see what’s growing? Don’t forget to take a bag and make sure you have a decent amount of vodka at home (which is good advice for anyone, herbalist or not).